Li "Jax" Jaxon was born in the small city of Tempasa on Bajor towards the end of the Cardassian Occupation of Bajor. His parents were both simple farmers who did everything they could to avoid trouble with either the Cardassians or the Bajoran Resistance. When Jax was five years old, a battle broke out between a resistance cell and a Cardassian armed unit near Jax's home. By the end of the battle, Jax's family was dead, his home destroyed and he was injured by shrapnel. Discovered by the escaping Resistance, Jax was picked up and taken with them to their camp. He was nursed back to health and taken in by the Resistance.

The young boy began to learn how to live with the Resistance, how to hide from their Cardassian pursuers and be self-sufficient. Even as a child, he learned weapons and tactics, hand to hand combat and survival skills with the Resistance cell. He was taken care of by a young woman named Rin Meila, a girl ten years his senior and already a hardened member of the Resistance. Rin had had a little brother killed when she was younger, of whom Jax reminded her. Jax, on the other hand, developed a crush on Meila that slowly bloomed into what he believed to be true love.

To be close to Meila, Jax worked hard to be the best soldier he could be. She was already a veteran in the battle against the Cardassians, and Jax wanted to be important to her. He spent much of his free time training both with Meila and Traver Kalas, the head training officer and co-leader of the Resistance cell which Jax served with. Kalas found the young boy eager to learn, even if it was for the wrong reasons. Kalas personally trained the boy, teaching him everything he needed to know to survive in a world where everybody was hunting him, and there was nobody to trust. Kalas even made a fighting knife for Jax, made out of stone as a reward for his accomplishments. Jax started going out on missions as a scout by the time he was nine, and had killed his first Cardassian at ten. Many more would follow before the end of the Occupation nearly four years later.

Upon the end of the Occupation, those in the Resistance found a new life waiting for them. Some returned home to what family they had left, others sought official service with the newly-reformed Bajoran government. Kalas, one of the only people Jax considered a friend, simply disappeared. Jax believed that as a professional soldier, Kalas felt he was no more use during peace time and took the opportunity to go elsewhere. Meila chose military service, taking a post on Deep Space Nine with the Bajoran militia. Jax wanted to follow, but Meila refused. She sent him to an orphanage, believing it better for him than to follow her to some military outpost. While Jax loved the girl, Meila had never seen him as anything other than a brother and good friend. Jax was crushed when Meila left, and he ran away from the orphanage he was sent to soon after.

Seeing himself as a man like Kalas; unnecessary in a newly-civilized society, Jax left Bajor altogether with little more than his prized phaser and knife among his possessions. Jax traveled around the Federation as well as outside it, moving from place to place, doing whatever work came his way. Normally, that meant errand work for the Orion Syndicate and other criminal enterprises. Jax began work for the Syndicate as a courier and errand boy for various small time bosses. Before too long, his martial skills were put to use as a hired gun. Despite his age, Jax proved remarkably capable at that sort of work. Since he was a contract worker, uninterested in swearing any oaths to officially join the Syndicate, he never advanced in any ranks and he occasionally supplemented his income with gambling, a new hobby he'd taken up and excelled in quickly. The teenager soon made a name for himself because of his skill and atypical youth for his profession.

When the Dominion War erupted, Jax saw more money-making potential than anything else in his life. He took up work as a paid mercenary and gun runner. His contacts with the Syndicate gave him access to a number of people who could provide weaponry at a good price which he could then turn around and sell to the right parties, concerned with being overrun by Dominion forces. When combined with his mercenary work, Jax began to turn around a more than healthy amount of profit. The war could go on forever as far as he was concerned. As a mercenary, his reputation grew, proving he was a young man capable of getting the mission done, but with a sometimes alarming amount of collateral damage. Oftentimes his solutions were loud, damaging and final. Jax had little concern for human life other than his own, but he followed every contract he was given through to the conclusion.

By the end of the war, Jax was sitting on a pile of money and looked ready to retire before he'd even hit twenty years old. Naturally, he gambled and drank his money away as quickly as he made it. With little income and no real wars left to be paid to fight, Jax took up a new career: bounty hunting. Jax discovered he was a talented bounty hunter, able to track people through his sizable contacts and simple mean determination. Even so, the contracts that stipulated his target be brought in alive proved to be somewhat difficult. Besides bounty hunting, he occasionally fell back to his old habits of arms dealing, theft, enforcer work and the old standby of cheating at cards.

Jax hit a rough patch, however, when he swindled Bolan Harkano, a former boss with the Syndicate. Bolan, an unjoined Trill, was a former head of one of the largest branches of the Syndicate and enjoyed gambling more than even Jax did. When Jolan discovered that Jax cheated him, he called down some favors and put a bounty on Jax's head, dead or alive. In the ensuing hunt, Jax lost his ship, most of his possessions and nearly his head. Jax was able to clear the matter up in his normal loud, brash style and once Jolan was presumed dead the contract was null and void. Despite the recent brushes with death, Jax quickly fell back to his old habits, and is trying to find a way to get some capital under him again.

Jax is a mercenary through and through. Willing to work just about any job for money, he is largely unconcerned with causes and individuals, seeing little more than the bottom line. Anything that keeps him in booze and women is good enough for him. He's largely unconcerned with the value of human life, even when it comes to his compatriots. If he knows he has to have them to keep himself alive, then he'll back them to the end. But his main concern is his own skin, and anything else trails after.

Jax is a larger-than-life kind of guy with a joke or story at hand and ready to tell. He's sociable and appreciates an audience, particularly when he's drunk. Still an immature kid at heart, Jax doesn't mind talking a mile a minute about anything that comes to mind. As long as there's drink flowing and women around, Jax will always be happy to have company. Privately, he's prone to occasional bouts of melancholy and even depression, given to spending time on his own with his black moods. He usually snaps out of it within a day or two, but when they come on it's difficult to drag more than a word or two out of him. Jax loves to gamble and has been known to go on for days, cheating whenever he can get away with it. He's won and lost fortunes at the table, and when he's gambling are the only times he'll refuse a drink, preferring to stay sober for the game. Jax likes to consider himself a rebel and swashbuckling hero more than a criminal or hired gun, no matter what anybody else would call him. Even though he'd rather die than admit it, Jax is something of a romantic at heart and modesty has never been one of his weaknesses.

Jax always travels with a small arsenal at hand. His favored weapon is a Bajoran phaser he's had since his days with the Resistance. He's named the pistol Meila, and allows nobody besides himself to touch it. Besides that, he also carries a Bajoran phaser rifle that can be disassembled for transport as well as a functioning but old type-2 hand phaser. Finally, he carries a Klingon d'k tahg and the stone knife that his former teacher, Traver Kalas, made for him. While Jax is a decent enough hand-to-hand fighter, he's an expert knife fighter and never has the weapon far from him. He wears the traditional Bajoran earring, but more out of habit than religious reverence, and has been known to gamble with it during cards more than once.

He also has an eye-patch.

Salvaged from the now-defunct Walkabout wikisite and reprinted here for the purposes of historical preservation.